Microbial Antarctic Resource System.

mARS is an information system dedicated to facilitate the discovery, access and analysis of molecular microbial diversity (meta)data generated by Antarctic researchers.

This includes the ability to upload information that describes (i) a research project that involves molecular microbial diversity sequence information (this goes into the Integrated Publishing Toolkit system that was developed by GBIF), (ii) communicating descriptive environmental information through a relatively newly accepted standard set of terms (Genomic Standards Consortium, MiMARKS), (iii) uploading links to DNA, RNA, proteomic or metabolomic data sets that have been deposited in public repositories, and the required metadata describing them.

A mARS Vision Paper was open for comments, and is now downloadable for consultation.

mARS will allow the discovery and integration of these microbial resources using BIODIVERSITY.AQ infrastructure. By harboring this information directly at BIODIVERSITY.AQ, Antarctic scientists will have the information archived and accessible through common language queries.